The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is a request/response protocol used in a network to resolve and bind, for example, a Layer 3 (L3) Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) address with a Layer 2 (L2) Media Access Control (MAC) address for communicating packets in a L2 network. Similarly, Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) is used to resolve and bind Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) address with an L2 MAC address. In a data center, virtual machines can move to different hardware platforms having different MAC addresses. Therefore, networked hosts in a data center network routinely send ARP requests and NDP Neighbor Solicitation messages to maintain the latest information for communicating with a service identified by an IP or other L3 network address.